Review Summary: Smashing that bass on the album cover was showing a clear message - the 3-chord crap was done, and with a vibrant disdain, The Clash were set to out-punk the punks.
The Clash had helped invent punk in the late seventies, as a violent reaction to the prog rock that was the mainstream. Now a few years later, punk was mainstream. The solution? They duped the record company into letting them do a "bonus 12-inch single" so they had two records to fill, and then unleashed the most eclectic album their cohorts had ever witnessed. Their orthodox roots don't go hurtling out the window, but it certainly looks like that on the surface at first. The famous songs from this album - the title track, 'Guns of Brixton' and 'Train in Vain' - were really my introduction to The Clash, and I was surprised to hear clear-cut punk, a reggae fusion and jangly almost-MOR derivative on the expectant sound. This only scratches the surface. The masters were ready to show the students they were still in the game, and ready to beat them at it in a way the students had never seen. Punk rock was the establishment now, but The Clash were not afraid to be anti-establishment once more. They hollered 'phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust' on the title track, but really phony punk-mania was ready to bite the dust. Because that's what I love the most about London Calling. It's a wonderful punk record BECAUSE the band that are playing on it are wary of punk music, simultaneously loving and hating what they had honed. They knew that something new had transpired in the atmosphere. And they responded by releasing one of the musically far-reaching double-albums ever. One of the doubles actually that works.
I wasn't sure whether I would like such a long album. On top of that, the amount of music styles that covered in just over an hour is quite frankly a little overwhelming at first. Simple punk, downtempo jazz, hard rock, reggae, pop and ska are all melded together in a weirdly intricate way that, if it wasn't so intricate, should come apart and resound as a musical plane crash of a failure. Some say "this is where The Clash do everything right". I wouldn't agree completely, but there's no denying that the first thirty-three-and-a-half minutes (tracks 1 through to 10 or the first LP) are nearly flawless, some of my personal highlights being the reggae-style pop of 'Rudie Can't Fail' and the lightweight disco vibe of 'Lost in the Supermarket'.The odd ska-punk hybrid 'Hateful', however, strikes a somewhat strange chord that in my personal opinion doesn't quite flow. The second half, on the other hand... is a mixed bag if I ever heard one. Maybe it's because gets slightly bloated at points, but part of me supposes that double-LPs have never really been my 'thing'. Despite the excessiveness, the band are still on fire, streaking through fusion cuts like 'The Card Cheat' and brutal hard-rock like 'I'm Not Down'. But their previous ability to make white reggae collapses at 'Revolution Rock', a durge-fest that drags for nearly six minutes. Thankfully 'Train in Vain' follows it, because that song is the perfect closer and bookend to go with 'London Calling'. Those who though The Clash couldn't do gentler rock songs were fooled.
I can mostly appreciate how this album cast its bright reflection over a generation or two, and is an enjoyable middle-finger to those who thought The Clash were musically grounded. They had clearly come a long way from the slightly roughened group that did tunes like 'Complete Control', although that song in question proved the band were giving middle-fingers from the start. The establishment had moved, and so had they. So obviously their third album was an oxymoronic journey, but a journey that paid off for about 85% of the time. This is just the perfectly focused sound of four frustrated individuals spreading their wings in the good name of rock 'n' roll. Only they were willing to do lots of twists and turns at frantic speed. What the band did on London Calling was take the OED definition of postmodernism - "characterised by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, and a mixing of different artistic styles and media" - and have quite a lot of fun with it whilst adhering to it, ending up with what I'm sure sounded weird for the sake of weird when it hit the shelves in the closing days of the seventies - the mid-December of '79, actually. Despite a few blunders along the way, the spirit is as fresh as ever and the proverbial box is truly being thought outside of. This album won't be an instant classic and takes time to really get through to you, but when it does, the majority of the songs make it really brilliant.
Number of tracks: 19
Accumulative score: 78/95
Average score: 4.11/5
